Etymologies

Examples

He is Robert Michael Pyle, lepidopterist, naturalist, conservationist and writer who knows the taxonomy and biogeographical distribution of the nation 's pale ales and lagers as well as he knows North America' s butterfly fauna.

In an extract from his new book The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals, Patrick Barkham goes on the trail of one of Britain's most elusive butterflies• Audio slideshow: the love of butterflies• How I became a lepidopterist

I was at the butterfly exhibit yesterday at the Natural History Museum (a highlight of my cultural life in NYC) and the curators included some information about Nabokov who, as you probably already know, was an impassioned lepidopterist who combined trekking and writing.

If you're forewarned about the only ill-advised and mildly amusing sexual simile in the book - "Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her" – then there's nothing else risible to fear, which for a novel with penetration on almost every page is an achievement.

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Comments

Should I abandon my art, choose another line of achievement, take up chess seriously, or become, say, a lepidopterist, or spend a dozen years as an obscure scholar making a Russian translation of Paradise Lost that would cause hacks to shy and asses to kick?--Vladimir Nabokov, 1974, Look at the Harlequins! p. 97